Composite modes in Avid - where's your plugin for this?!

Its a big grumble in the Avid community that blending modes aren't natively provided, and Im disappointed to find you havent developed a plugin for this given that its such a simple mathematical process.

The only hint of it I can find is in the radial gradient plug....

Think your missing a trick by not including a real-time composite tool.... if you did Avid users would swarm to download your tools!

Might be worth adding it to the next update?

Comments

Um...what? Layer blending modes like Add, Multiply, Overlay, Screen, etc. are part of every layer in HitFilm. In the main Editor timeline, select any clip, select the Controls tab, and expand Clip Properties. In a composite shot, it's labeled Layer Properties. In both places, you'll find a Blend property with 20 options. Many effects have them as well.

SionRoberts while the Blend Modes are known, defined mathematical procedures, creating a "Blend Mode" plug in is still a certain amount of work for something that would likely need to be in all versions of Ignite (else users would ask, "Why is this Avid only?"). On the other hand, since certain effects have blend modes built in, the coding is extant. Either this is a super easy thing to implement or much harder than we'd think.

Cedric, this is an interesting idea. Basically the effect would just pass through the source layer with a blend mode--and would cover something that in Avid requires Boris Red ($1000). Potentially, a Blend Mode effect would make Ignite Pro very attractive to Avid owners since it's 1/5 the price of Boris Red. Sion is on to a great idea.

I'll even tag @JoshDaviesCEO on this one, because I'm not certain who to tag in Marketing.

On further thought this might be interesting for other NLEs since Blend Mode usually comes at the end of a chain. Putting Blend Modes anywhere in a chain opens up a lot of interesting ways to use latter effects without needing another layer.

The more I think about it the better the idea is, and the easier I think the code is! Call it Layer Blend.

I wonder if a normal effect can do this. An effect only operates on the current track/layer. A blend mode is not an effect like any other effect and it does need to be the last thing done on a track/layer. It is the composite operation of the current track/layer result with whatever is the result from under the current track/layer.

This is kinda like the Vegas "compositors" window recently talked about in another thread. These are external filters but they are not a 'normal' effect. They are a different class of filter. They provide a custom blend of two tracks. A custom blend in the mode list with Normal, Multiply, Overlay and such.

So I think the question becomes, does Avid support such special external filter types in their external plug-in format. If Avid does not have the standard blends then I would not bet the farm on it.

@NormanPCN while I don't have Avid Media Composer, let's assume for a moment that Ignite Effects with blend modes (Lightning is an example) have the blend modes functioning. So, it should absolutely be possible to create a plug-in that basically passes through the layer and applies a blend mode. While every other application with blend modes applies the blend as the final summation of the layer, such a theoretical plug-in to do a blend mode should be possible and could potentially allow effects after a blend.

If Ignite in Avid allows source layers to be selected, it should totally be possible to grab a layer's pixel data and apply a blend. I can always be wrong--I'm not a coder--but I can't immediately think of a reason it's impossible.

And,as previously stated, that would give Ignite something that Boris Red can do in Avid atn1/5 the price. That's a great sales-driver for Avid editors. Probably more than worth the programmer time. If cost on this would be under, say, $2000, then maybe 25-50 Ignite licenses pays that back.

I initially thought this an impractical idea. Only took me less than an hour to reverse this thought.

It's good to see I've started a discussion about this! It's genuinely a big gripe amongst Avid editors.... of all the great things Avid can do, to still not provide basic blending tools like every other NLE is pretty pathetic.

There was actually a third-party plugin that did this for free quite sometime ago called DMN Transfer - but its 32bit architecture has long since been incompatible with Avid. So our options today are limited to shelling out a fortune for Boris/Sapphire, using the obsolete Avid FX plugin (its no longer included in the MC package and was pretty crap anyway) or sending out clips to AE/Fusion, which is totally overkill for a simple task.

If you've got the resources to develop a plugin, then the payoff in tapping into the Avid market could certainly be worth it. I'd even suggest throwing a 'lite' version (say a simple drop down list of blends with a mix slider) in with your express package.... if you announced on the Avid discussion boards you were doing this, I'd expect you'd get huge amount of traffic to your site!

Can I give a big +1 to this? It's ridiculous that in 2019 media composer doesn't come with blend mode effects built in. You'd sell Ignite Pro in a heartbeat to thousands of Avid editors. $300 is a no-brainer to those of us who cut paying work for clients all the time. Personally, I used to own Boris Continuum Complete when it was bundled with Media Composer, but when they changed the plugin architecture those old plugins stopped working. Then Avid stopped including it with the cost of MC. And now, my old copy of AvidFX (aka Boris Red) is throwing C++ errors on half of my render attempts. I started using Ignite pro over a year ago, and about half of the stuff BCC did Ignite Pro does anyway and a whole lot cheaper. But blend modes are a big gaping hole that Ignite Pro could fill.

The question isn't whether or not you should build this feature into Ignite Pro for Avid... it's "how quickly can we do it"! And put money in your pockets.

2nd feature request of the day... Did you know that media composer also doesn't have a good motion blur or "RGB channel shift" capability built in? If you just included more presets for Ignite RGB Shift (already there) or combined them with motion blur capability, it would give us more fun stuff to use in vlogs, music videos and montages on the Avid side of the fence. Lots of opportunities to optimize your product and sell more units here.